Johann Friedrich Herbart

Johann Friedrich Herbart (born May 4, 1776, Oldenburg—died Aug. 14, 1841, Göttingen, Hanover) was a German philosopher and educator, who led the renewed 19th-century interest in Realism and is considered among the founders of modern scientific pedagogy.

After studying under Johann Gottlieb Fichte at Jena (1794), Herbart worked as a tutor at Interlaken, Switz., from 1797 to 1800, during which period he made the acquaintance of Pestalozzi. Becoming a licentiate of the University of Göttingen in 1802, he was appointed extraordinary professor there in 1805. At the close of 1808 he became Kant’s successor as professor at Königsberg. There he also conducted a seminary of pedagogy until 1833, when he returned as professor of philosophy to Göttingen, where he remained until his death.

Herbart’s position in the history of philosophy is due mainly to his contributions to the philosophy of mind. His aims in this respect are expressed by the title of his textbook—Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegrundet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und Mathematik, 2 vol. (1824–25; “Psychology As Knowledge Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics”); of central importance is the inclusion of Mathematik. He rejected the whole concept of faculties (in Kantian terms) and regarded mental life as the manifestation of elementary sensory units or “presentations” (Vorstellungen). These he conceived as mental forces rather than as mere “ideas” in Locke’s sense. The study of their interactions gave rise to a statics and dynamics of the mind, to be expressed in mathematical formulas like those of Newtonian mechanics. Ideas need not be conscious; and they might either combine to produce composite resultants or conflict with one another so that some get temporarily inhibited or repressed “below the threshold of consciousness.” An organized but unconscious system of associated ideas formed an “apperception mass”; such a system could apperceive a new presentation and thus give it richer meaning. On this basis Herbart developed a theory of education as a branch of applied psychology.

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His theory of education—known as Herbartianism—was set out principally in two works, Pestalozzis Idee eines A B C der Anschauung (1802; “Pestalozzi’s Idea of an A B C of Sense Perception”) and Allgemeine Pädagogik (1806; “Universal Pedagogy”), which advocated five formal steps in teaching: (1) preparation, a process of relating new material to be learned to relevant past ideas or memories in order to give the pupil a vital interest in the topic under consideration; (2) presentation, presenting new material by means of concrete objects or actual experience; (3) association, thorough assimilation of the new idea through comparison with former ideas and consideration of their similarities and differences in order to implant the new idea in the mind; (4) generalization, a procedure especially important to the instruction of adolescents and designed to develop the mind beyond the level of perception and the concrete; and (5) application, using acquired knowledge not in a purely utilitarian way, but so that every learned idea becomes a part of the functional mind and an aid to a clear, vital interpretation of life. This step is presumed possible only if the student immediately applies the new idea, making it his own.

Herbart maintained that a science of education was possible, and he furthered the idea that education should be a subject for university study. His ideas took firm hold in Germany in the 1860s and spread also to the United States. By the turn of the century, however, the five steps had degenerated to a mechanical formalism, and the ideas behind them were replaced by new pedagogical theories, in particular those of John Dewey.